Sunday, February 17, 2019

Conecting Windows 10 Laptop to USB connected network drive on an Apple Airport Extreme

I have had for a good while now the Apple Airport Extreme base station.  Yes, I know it's time to upgrade to a Nighthawk, but I'm lazy.  And have kids,

Speaking of kids, I rebuilt and lit up a refurbished Windows 10 laptop for my Dear Daughter to use going back and forth to college.  We keep all our backups, music,  movies etc on a pair of drives connected to the USB port on the Apple Airport Extreme base station.

So, I tried to map the base station shared drives using the typical UNC network protocol (\\10.0.1.1\) in the Explorer bar.  No dice.  Tried the 'Map Network Drive' button in Explorer.  No dice.

Then I got around to searching and found a post in a long-dead thread that mentioned you should install the Airport Utility for Windows .  So I did.  And while it was installing, I noticed it was also installing Bonjour drivers.  Once it completed, I still couldn't connect.

Mapping a drive from the file explorer finally threw a useful error message - the Airport Extreme uses old SMB1 protocol, and that's blocked by default due to old insecure protocols.  Well, this is a home network and has nothing sensitive on the shared drives.  So, I found that you can enable SMB1 Sharing Protocol in Windows 10 by running 'optionalfeatures.exe'.
Hit Windows Key and R for 'Run Program' and run optionalfeatures.exe.

From there you get a nice dialog box with everything you can, and cannot enable.  SMB1 is disabled.  Enable it.  Restart the PC.

Now, from Explorer, you can connect to a Network Share or Map a Network Drive.  Easy, eh?

-- Will England

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